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Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Fixing the Academic Job Market

Sometimes, you read about solution so novel, you just can't wait to see it tried. This was presented by Jeffrey J. Williams in Inside Higher Ed (hat tip TaxProf Blog):

Academe is in crisis. Young academics
have been left out in the cold: according to American Association of
University Professors (AAUP) statistics, only about 25 percent of new
Ph.D.s find full-time, permanent jobs. We are wasting the talent of a
generation.
...
Therefore, the best recourse is to solve the problem ourselves, taking matters into our own hands, as it were. To that end, I have recently founded an organization, Academic Opportunities Unlimited (AOU). Our motto is “We can’t guarantee you’ll get the job, but we can guarantee an opening.”

AOU is elegant in its simplicity, rebalancing an artificially skewed market. One of the effects of the job crisis is an aging professoriate. Since the 1970s, the scales have tipped heavily AARP-ward: while only 17 percent of faculty were 50 or over in 1969, a bloated 52% had crossed that divide by 1998. It is no doubt worse now, and strangling the air supply of potential new professors.

AOU would work to remedy this bias against youth. It would, through a rigorous screening process, pinpoint faculty who are clogging positions and select them for hits, or “extra-academic retirement” (EAR). While this might raise qualms from the more liberal-minded among us, we would argue that it is more humane, both to potential faculty who otherwise have been shunted aside and to those languishing in the holding pattern of a withered career, than our current system. The retirement would be efficient and quick, and strictly limited to those who, as the saying goes, have their best years long behind them.